Two Witches Walk Into A Bar
by Keryl Raist
Summary: Willow and Hermione meet in a bar to discuss the 20 or so years since their stories ended, and a HogwartsWatchers Academy teacher exchange. This started as a one shot and is slowly evolving into a much bigger story.


**Two Witches Walk into a Bar….**

The red head had arrived a bit late on purpose, she wanted to see if she could tell who her drinking companion was just by looking. Scanning the crowd she noticed a woman with long brown hair, pulled back and braided, sitting alone. "Her." she thought.

"Ms. Granger?" The brunette looked up and offered her hand, "Yes, although in most circles I go by Professor Weasley. You must be Ms. Rosenberg."

"Usually Willow. I know the first names all the time is an American thing. I suppose I'll have to get used to being called Professor Rosenberg."

"Your students call you Willow?"

"Well, it's better than 'Hey You.'" Hermione thought about this for a moment.

"They won't expect to call me Hermione? Will they?"

"Probably not, they've got better manners with company. Most visiting teachers find them charming. Granted most visiting teachers are there to teach them some new form of physical combat… but I'm sure they'll give you the same respect they give swordsmen and judo masters."

"Lovely."

They both sipped at their drinks for a moment, finally Hermione said, "I'm curious, how did you guys figure out that we were, well, real?"

"This is going to sound silly, but the books came out, and we (me and a few friends) really liked them. We were talking about the books and were musing on how cool it would be if you guys were real. How wonderful some sort of Hogwarts kind of school would be. Well, it occurred to me that I'm a fictional character, why not you? Ten minutes later we had a locator spell set up and ready to go. Hogwarts may be unplottable, but you, Professor Weasley are not."

Hermione smiled at Willow, "Actually I am unplottable, but in a more subtle sort of way. If you look for me, you'll find something, and trust me, it won't be remotely near where I actually am. And, I'll get a sort of magical ping to let me know someone is looking. That was one of Moody's old tricks, it's a pretty good one too. By the time the person comes for me, I've got my ambush set. I was on edge for three days waiting for some unknown tree to come and get me before your Owl showed up."

"Sorry about that." Willow smiled sheepishly.

"Where did I come up?"

"Outside of Inverness."

"Ohhh… that's a good one. It's a deep pit in a magic free zone, you can Apparate in, but then none of your magic works. I usually come by a day or two later, and see who's in the pit, and if they can be let out. There's still a few skeletons in there from the clean-up of the Death Eaters."

"How does the reverse tracking work?"

Hermione rifled through her pack. She came up with a small book, opened it, and handed it to Willow. Willow looked at it for a minute.

"It's a tiny atlas."

"Yep, Muggles make them for travelers. Mine has a few extras added in. Your spell fired, and I felt a tingle that lets me know someone is looking. The atlas opens to the correct page, and there was the word 'Willow' hovering over Boston."

Willow handed back the atlas. "This is why I want us to have this kind of magical exchange. This is so much more sophisticated than any of the magical… stuff, for want of a better word, than we've got back home."

The two of them sat in silence for a few moments, sipping their drinks, before Willow spoke again.

"Actually, if you don't mind, two of my friends (An image of Spike and Xander sitting around the books arguing flashed through her mind.) back home would love you to settle a bet." Hermione nodded and sipped her drink.

"Did you actually write the books?"

Hermione looked surprised for a moment. "No one's ever asked me that. Why did one of your friends think so?"

"Well… there were really only three people who could have written the books, and since Ron died, and Harry is characterized in such a manner as to make it very unlikely that he wanted to become the most famous boy in the world, that left you. The other theory is that J.K. Rowlings is a squib that was around during the second Wizarding War, and wrote from her research."

"It's both actually. I wrote the first four books, before we went after Voldemort, then when it was done I wanted to finish the stories, but it just hurt too much to write. Joanne is a squib and her cousin Lavender had mentioned that she liked to write. So I went to see her. Gave her the first four, and then told her how the story ended. She's a better writer than I am, so she edited and spruced up the first four, and then wrote the last three based on hours of conversations and notebooks full of notes. She did a really good job with what I had given her, but that's why production really slows down after the first four books, she had to put the last three together from scratch. How about you, how did you end up a 'fictional character?'"

"Did you ever see any of the _Buffy_ shows?"

"Years ago I took a course on Magic in the Muggle World, and some of the _Buffy_ shows were in the course. I liked them enough that that summer I watched the whole series. When I got your owl I checked them out and watched them again." Willow looked puzzled at the idea of Hermione and DVDs but decided to let it pass for a later date.

"Good, well, you remember the Andrew character that shows up on occasion, especially in the last season?" Hermione nodded. "Change his name to Joss."

"Oh."

"He took quite a few liberties with what really happened, but most of the essentials are correct."

"Liberties?"

"Yeah, like, he's really into English people, so he made the Watcher's Council English. We're an American group back to the 1680's, but well, I guess that's boring. British accents are much cooler than Boston ones I guess."

"Giles and Spike?"

"Giles is from Boston, his family has been producing Watchers for the last 220 years. Spike is English, but he's the only one. Plus he's been in the States for the last 80 years, so not too much of an accent left. Still like British curse words though."

"Also, Joss did join us from a less than noble background, so he's big on redemption. It shows up in the show, but most of the rest of us haven't had nearly the problems or need for redemption. Well, Spike, but he's doing very well. Like when Oz was killed, I did take out everyone involved in his murder, but none of the black-haired, veiny, evil Willow, who spends the next three years on a quest for redemption. As you know sometimes humans need to be killed, and the correct thing to do is go out, kill them, and get it done before they harm someone else."

"Yes, I do know. Even if she hadn't killed Ron, Bellatrix had to die. She wasn't fit for life. It's one of things I would have rather not had to do, but I'm proud I did it."

"That's how I feel about…about the bastards that killed Oz. I'd have much rather had Oz alive and with me, but since that's not how it worked out, I can be proud of the fact that I took out his killers, and saved who knows how many others by doing so. But Joss is a little fuzzy when it comes to moral thinking."

"Wait, Oz was killed? So was there a Tara?"

"Nope, only Oz."

"Oz was a girl?"

"No. Look, we've got a fair number of lesbians among the Slayers, and I have yet to meet one that suddenly turned gay out of nowhere. But lesbians were hot that year, and Joss says stable happy relationships are boring, so there aren't a lot of them on the show. It did piss me off the way he wrote out Oz, I mean didn't he know wolves mate for life? Oz wouldn't have just run off because he smelled some other… anyway… TMI. What about you, Mrs. Weasley? There was nothing about you and Ron getting married in the books."

"No, it's actually Mrs. Fred Weasley. After we took out Voldemort for a long time I just… well didn't do much of anything…mostly just studied. Put the hurt behind me, and spent as much time numb as I could. After a bit I felt like I could start to deal with the fall out, and spent a year or two working on that. I didn't see the Weasleys much at that point, spent most of the time among the Muggles, but Hedwig found me with an invitation for Harry and Ginny's wedding, they asked me to be their binder, so I couldn't refuse. At the wedding I realized that the Weasleys were as much, if not more, my family then my real parents. Also Fred caught my attention. He's a bit of a rogue in the books, well, he's a bit of rogue in real life also, but not nearly as bad as he is in the books. But since George was killed, he's grown up a lot, calmed down, and we slowly started courting. We got married eight years ago."

"So Harry and Ginny got married?"

"Yep, twelve years ago. J.S. Potter will be starting Hogwarts next year. He's a sweetie, looks just like his Dad with red hair. I'll be glad to be back to teach for his first year. He's also got two little sisters eight, and six, and if I'm any judge, they'll be breaking hearts and rules left and right." Hermione looked wistful for a moment then added, "So how did your story end, or at least, what's happened up to now?"

"Sunnydale, a.k.a Pine Bluffs is still standing. Our final battle there wrecked a large chunk of the town, but not the whole thing. Most of the people still living there are amazed at how fast the crime rate dropped after two thirds of town was "destroyed in an earthquake." We've since found that proximity to a Hellmouth causes an increase in gullibility. It's some sort of mystical effect that the Hellmouth produces as a self defense method. Basically the closer and the longer you live near a Hellmouth the dumber and more willing to believe silly things you are."

"After Pine Bluffs we: myself, Buffy, and Xander, moved to Cleveland. It took three years, but we were able to get Hellmouth part II closed. The rest of the crew went to Boston to revamp the Watcher's Council and get it ready to deal with about 80 girls at any given time. By the time we finished with Cleveland there were enough trained Slayers to start sending them out on their own."

"Xander and I then went back to the Council. We'd had enough of spending all of our nights and weekends getting beaten into a pulp. Plus as good at healing as I am, Xander is still very human, and both of us were edging towards 30, neither of us bounced the way we did when we were kids. I can't tell you how much I respect Giles for sticking with us all those years. I'm the same age now that he was when we met him, and I don't want to have anything to do with sticking sharp objects in monsters anymore. Giles arranged for a pension for Xander, and he's pretty happy running a contracting business outside of Boston these days. I've been with the Council, using my powers to help out, and trying to get them to encourage the use of magic among the Slayers. As you can see I finally got them to listen to me. Any given year there are only ten or so that show any skill at magic, but imagine what they'll be able to do, spells in one hand, stake in the other." Willow looked dreamy for a moment, then shook her head.

"Buffy picked a few Slayers that looked the most talented and headed off to New Orleans for Hellmouth part III. Well, that particular Hellmouth decided that it wasn't going without a fight. You probably heard about the destruction of New Orleans and most of the Gulf Coast a six years back."

Hermione nodded. "Well, between you and I, there was no hurricane. After that she had had enough of leaving despair and destruction in her wake. She'd killed the bad guys, and made the world a safer place, but left tens of thousands homeless, and who knows how many dead. She went through a very black period where we spent quite a time trying to convince her that it's not better to leave the Evil in place because some people, a lot of people, will get hurt when you get rid of it. Good cells die when you cut a cancer out, but you don't leave the cancer in place. It's been seventeen years since Pine Bluffs and it's become a lovely town. Hell, the whole of California seen a drop in it's crime and mayhem rate. It's just very hard when you only stick around for the immediate aftermath."

"She had been moping around the Council, teaching some advanced combat when a man came into her sparring room. He got in without any of us seeing him, but as she tells me, she was working blindfolded with one of the students when a faint whiff of smoke and leather caught her attention. She stopped the combat, turned and saw him."

"Him?"

"Spike, he was lounging against the wall watching the fight. We thought he had died at the first Hellmouth, what with that whole bursting into flames, disintegrating into a pile of ash thing, but apparently he wasn't quite done yet. As he's told us, and this is a bit of speculation, and a bit of fact, and a bit of Spike just likes a good story (he's the one who thinks you wrote the Harry Potter books.) There was this prophecy about a Vampire with a Soul who would be involved in the Apocalypse and then do something really great, and become a human again. So while we were dealing with the first Hellmouth, Angle the Vampire with a Soul, went and mucked up his chance for once more becoming human. He had just saved the world from an entity that would have made us all happy and live in harmony and love. I.E. what most of us would call Heaven. But being Mr. Broodypants he had to go stop that. After all, if Angle isn't happy, then no one should be happy!" Willow scowled.

"I don't like Angel much… so here's where the story gets interesting. By totally missing the point of what it was he was supposed to do the Powers That Be reached out for a new Vampire with a Soul to be involved in the Apocalypse, and then do the right thing and become human. So six weeks after bursting into flame Spike was back, a ghost, but back. He became a vampire again, and spent the next few years working on being Spike, he found his Apocalypse, did the right thing, and came back to Buffy a human. They've been together for the last three years. Most of the girls think he's the coolest think they've ever seen. He teaches some history, some combat, some poetry and literature, but these days his favorite pastime is playing with their little girl."

"And Giles?"

"He's head of the Council. Married Anya a while back," Willow caught Hermione's look of surprise, "Yes, some of the newbies got killed at Hellmouth I, but none of our core group did. Besides Anya had over a thousand years worth of dirty tricks to pull out of her sleeve. No eyeless bastard was going to run a knife through her. Anya human, or non-human, she's pretty tough, she's got spells, moves, and nerves that would amaze most people. I don't know why Joss made her so whiny. I mean you can't spend 1000 years at vengeance and act like her character in the show, it just doesn't jibe. But he needed a love interest for Xander, and once more, the redemption thing. Did Joanne take as many liberties with your story as Joss did with ours?"

"I don't think so. I mean some of the characters are a bit nicer or less nice depending on what made the story go better. If you can believe it, Umbridge was even more disgusting then she was in the books. I've seen readers spend pages of words trying to excoriate/defend me for taking her to the Centaurs, but if they had met the real woman… Well, let's put it this way no one who has met her thinks that I was unjustified in trying to get her killed. We finally got her brought up on charges for setting the Dementors on Harry. She's still in Azkaban.

Rowling made Dumbledore softer than he was in real life also. He was a great man, and I will never feel anything but respect and love for him, but when he needed to, he made cold decisions, down to his own death. He played Harry, Ron, and I, making sure we got enough information to do what he wanted us to do. He was a great strategist, and he could see much more of the game than we could. Harry was angry at Dumbledore for a long time when he learned how we had been used. But I respected him more, Dumbledore could see what needed to be done, and knew what tools he had at his disposal, and he used us accordingly. His plan got most of us out of it alive too…"

"We were 18 when the fighting finished. He knew that there was no way to just tell us to go out and kill. At least no way to do it and leave us with any sense of right and wrong. I read a book once, Ender's Game, and he could have used us like Ender, but he didn't and because he didn't we got to be children for a while." Hermione paused thinking back on the man who had changed the course of her life.

Willow added, "We were lucky, we fought soulless monsters. Evil with a capital E, and no qualms about destroying it. The whole, we don't kill humans thing may have been a cop out, but it was a cop out that let us be kids. Buffy had a very hard time as she got older, and more and more real people got involved in what we did. People got killed, people needed to be killed, and it took quite a lot of soul searching to figure out how that all worked."

"So what else was different in real life from the books?" Willow asked.

"The plot is mostly the same. There was no Rita Skeeter. She's a bit of wish fulfillment on the part of Joanne. Moody never recovered from his time in the box. We barely noticed Malfoy and his buddies before Harry found out their Dads were Death Eaters. The house rivalry was played up for the books. Fleur and Bill never actually met, but she wanted a lot of romance for book six and seven, and Bill's wife didn't want to be famous." Hermione thought for a minute. "Oh, here's a big one, Neville wasn't the anti-Harry. He was a lot more competent. Yes, his parents were tortured into madness, but that was just for the fun of it. Like I said, Bellatrix needed killing. The prophecy was always Harry. Joanne thought adding an additional possible Chosen One would be interesting. And after we saw how much the fans liked playing with ideas from the stories she did add some in just for the fun of it."

Hermione sipped her drink and looked thoughtful. "I suppose the biggest, hardest problem to deal with was Snape. Joanne and I decided to play it up for the last three books, so many of the fans were having such fun with the question of Snape. We never really figured out what exactly he was up to. Both Dumbledore and Voldemort went to their graves totally convinced that Snape was his man. Harry has always been convinced that Snape was just as evil as could be, Joanne underplayed the joy Snape took in abusing Harry. And she left out the reason why Snape hated James so much, the real memory Snape kept in the pensive is not just that James liked to torment him, but that he did so because Snape had been in love with James. Apparently there had been some sort of adolescent affair between the two of them early in fourth year, and it ended badly. They then spent the rest of their school lives trying to make each other miserable. Then along comes Harry the spitting image of James. Must have driven Snape mad." Hermione paused and looked thoughtful for a moment.

"Anyway, as to what side Snape was on. We fought Snape six times while hunting the Horcruxes, and somehow he never managed to hurt any of us, and we always knew a new spell or two from that combat, and just as often had a new clue as to where the next Horcrux was. I sat in class and watched Snape teach for six years, and never did I get the impression that he ever did anything by accident. So I don't think that he just happened to give us information that got us out of a few jams, and showed us some spiffy new combat spells. My pet theory: in the end Snape decided to save the child of a boy he once loved, but I couldn't prove it."

"Then again, as Harry tells the story Snape's final spell 'accidentally' hit Voldemort, stunning him and allowing Harry to kill him." She paused again, "From my viewpoint, it looked like Snape aimed at Voldemort, but I'll admit I was kind of busy tossing spells about at the time. What I do know is this, that spell hit Voldemort and took him down, Harry was able to fire off the Avada Kedavra and that killed Voldemort, a killing curse hit Snape, I think fired by Bellatrix, but so many spells were flying around it's impossible to be sure what happened. She saw Voldemort die, started screaming, and I killed her. Within the next minute or two the rest of the Death Eaters were gone."

"We've tracked them all down over the years. Some are still in prison, some are dead, some we've let back into Wizarding society. It was hard to believe how few of them there really was. When all was said and done there were less than two hundred of them."

"That's it?"

"Yep, we expected more, but really they were just very well connected."

Willow thought about that for a moment. Looked like she was about to say something, and then changed her mind, took a drink, and asked,

"So Harry and Ginny got married, what else happened with them?"

"They didn't get married right away. For about two years after the war Harry went away. None of us knows what he did during that time. We'd get the occasional letter saying that he was alive, and more or less well, but that would be it. Then one day in October he was sitting outside the Burrow waiting for the Weasley's to get home. As he explains it, he needed a few years to get the poisons out. To be worthy of going home. He came home to the Weasleys a calmer, gentler soul then I remembered him. He and Ginny went back to courting for the next two years, and then got married."

"So that was four years after the war. Harry's had a few jobs since then. He never did become an Auror, he'd done too much fighting already for that to be appealing. For a few years he was Seeker for England, not so much because he's the greatest Seeker ever, but he really is the national symbol of English Wizardry. (It's not like anyone would turn Harry Potter down for a job.) Since then he decided to head back to Hogwarts. He's the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher now. Remus held the job for the eight years after the war, until he saved up enough to create the Werewolf Academy. The school helps young/new werewolves who want to be part of society do so."

"And you, the books end with you taking up McGonagall's position at Hogwarts?"

"That's not quite true. I actually teach Arithmancy, but no one can remember what that really is, so Jo changed it to Transfiguration. During the summers I help at Weasley's Wizarding Whizzes. We've got shops all over the globe now, and a very impressive catalogue business. Sometimes I debate about working for a company that when I'm at school I confiscate the products of. Not sure if that's too ethical. But Harry owns a half share of the business as well, so it's not like I'm the only one. We have a joke about how between the two of us we confiscate enough WWW's to make up at least fifteen percent of our repeat business."

Hermione looked at her watch, "I'll have to get home soon, so tell me about my soon to be new students."

"Ever since the 'Sharing of the Slay,' we've been getting about ten to fifteen new girls a year. They all have Slayer speed, strength, healing, etc. All the perks of Super Woman, they just can't fly. For most of them that's enough. But each year, one or two of them is really exceptional. I can see the magical talent in them, and have been nurturing it, but magic the American way requires a huge amount of time, concentration, and energy. It's very hard to be in the midst of a drop down, drag out, kill everyone around you fight, stop, focus, force the magic to your will, and then use it against the opponent. It can be done, we have two full fledged BattleWitches, but it's almost impossible. Then one afternoon Shelly (one of my girls) said to me, wouldn't it be great if we could use wands. She had just missed the same spell for the sixth time in a row, and was getting pretty frustrated. We had already done the spell to see if you guys were real, and from there, well, you were only an owl away. How about my students?"

"I'd never given any thought to the idea that you and the Buffy crew might have been real. But when your owl came I was intrigued. Our students have a major hole in their training, and it's non-verbal, non-wand spells. As you said, it can be done, but it takes a lot of focus and energy. You'll have a select class of seventh years, all of whom are interested in having a back up if their wand is gone. Most of them intend to become Aurors."

"I'm looking forward to our exchange Ms…Willow. I think this is going to be a lot of fun."

"Classes begin first of September, right?"

"Yes."

"Well then, until we get to share notes on our new students." Willow lifter her almost empty glass to Hermione. They both drank.

"Until then." Hermione vanished out of the bar.


End file.
